1st Recipe Question!!

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balzern

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Hey everyone. I got Designing Great Beers by Ray Daniels for Christmas :) I am trying to create a Robust Porter using extract for my first recipe. This is what I have so far, let me know what you think!

5 Gallon Batch - 60 minute Boil


OG 1.055
FG 1.017
ABV 5.1
SRM 31
43.5 IBU

7 lbs Light DME
1 lb Dark Crystal Crushed
5 oz Chocolate Malt Crushed
5 oz Black Malt Crushed

1 oz Chinook (60 minutes)
2 oz East Kent (10 minutes)

Yeast - Wyeast 1968 London ESB

Thanks!!! :tank:
 
good luck. my first batch was an almost identical porter and it was so bad that i went immediately to all grain for my second batch, which was an excellent fat tire clone. the porter never got fully carbonated, so maybe it would have been a good beer if it had.

7 lb LME
1 lb Crystal 60
10 oz Chocolate Malt
6 oz Malto Dextrin

2oz fuggles 60 min
.25oz fuggles 15 min

liquid english ale yeast
 
Looks good, but I'd exchange the Chinook for an English hop variety (and yes, you will get flavor in addition to the bitterness in a 60min boil). Also, IMO cut your crystal to 1/2-3/4lb max. I've done beers with a full pound of crystal in them, they wind up tasting like crystal more than beer. It's a good bet that your extract is made with a portion of carapils, anyway.
 
The recipe looks good, but it looks to me like it will be more on the sweet side than you may want.

You could try subbing the Chinook for Fuggles maybe, I've had sucess with that English variety.
 
I always recommend Designing Great Beers to anyone interested in building their own recipes. As long as you stayed in the parameters for that style (keeping your individual preferences in mind), you should be fine.
 
I decreased the crystal to 12 oz and changed the Chinook to 1.5 oz of Progress pellets. Wanted to use another English hop. Bercalc. says that it will have


1.054 OG
30 SRM
34.5 IBU
4.9 ABV


what do you think about these corrections?
 
You can up the IBUs in a porter if you like. One thing Daniels gets into in DGB is the IBU:OG ratio for each style (divide your IBUs by the numbers to the right of the decimal of your OG). Paying attention to these ratios greatly improved my beers. For porters he recommends a IBU:OG ratio of 0.7-0.9. Your OG of 1.054 and IBU of 34.5 yeilds a ratio of 0.648. If you bring your IBUs up to 44, you'll get a ratio of 0.841 - right in the middle of RD's recommendation.

That said, your recipe looks good as it is. It might have a little less bite than more classically styled porters, but it will still be tasty.

And of course there's no sense in getting too obsessive about targeting IBUs precisely. The threshold for humans to detect a change in bitterness is about 5 IBU - and that's in low-hopped, tasteless pale American lagers
 
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